Critical Thinking Skills

In the introduction, we suggested you look for a list
of mental abilities and attitudes or habits, the
experts, when faced with the same problem
you are working on, refer to their lists as
including cognitive skills and dispositions. As
to the cognitive skills here*s what the experts
include as being at the very core of critical
thinking: interpretation, analysis, evaluation,
inference, explanation, and self-regulation.
(We*ll get to the dispositions in just a
second.) Did any of these words or ideas
come up when you tried to characterize the
cognitive skills — mental abilities — involved
in critical thinking?

Quoting from the consensus
statement of the national panel of experts:
interpretation is "to comprehend and
express the meaning or significance of a wide
variety of experiences, situations, data,
events, judgments, conventions, beliefs,
rules, procedures, or criteria."
[2]

Interpretation
includes the sub-skills of categorization,
decoding significance, and clarifying
meaning. Can you think of examples of
interpretation? How about recognizing a
problem and describing it without bias? How
about reading a person*s intentions in the
expression on her face; distinguishing a main
idea from subordinate ideas in a text;
constructing a tentative categorization or way
of organizing something you are studying;
paraphrasing someone*s ideas in your own
words; or, clarifying what a sign, chart or
graph means? What about identifying an
author*s purpose, theme, or point of view?
How about what you did above when you
clarified what "offensive violence" meant?

Again from the experts: analysis is "to
identify the intended and actual inferential
relationships among statements, questions,
concepts, descriptions, or other forms of
representation intended to express belief,
judgment, experiences, reasons, information,
or opinions." The experts include examining
ideas, detecting arguments, and analyzing
arguments as sub-skills of analysis. Again,
can you come up with some examples of analysis?
What about identifying the
similarities and differences between two
approaches to the solution of a given
problem? What about picking out the main
claim made in a newspaper editorial and
tracing back the various reasons the editor
offers in support of that claim? Or, what
about identifying unstated assumptions;
constructing a way to represent a main
conclusion and the various reasons given to
support or criticize it;
sketching the relationship of sentences or paragraphs
to each other and to the main purpose of the
passage? What about graphically organizing
this essay, in your own way, knowing that its
purpose is to give a preliminary idea about
what critical thinking means?

The experts define evaluation as
meaning "to assess the credibility of
statements or other representations which are
accounts or descriptions of a person*s
perception, experience, situation, judgment,
belief, or opinion; and to assess the logical
strength of the actual or intended inferential
relationships amongstatements,descriptions,
questions or other forms of representation."
Your examples? How about judging an
author*s or speaker’s credibility, comparing
the strengths and weaknesses of alternative
interpretations, determining the credibility of a
source of information, judging if two
statements contradict each other, or judging
if the evidence at hand supports the
conclusion being drawn?
Among the
examples the experts propose are these:
"recognizing the factors which make a person
a credible witness regarding a given event or
a credible authority with regard to a given
topic," "judging if an argument*s conclusion
follows either with certainty or with a high
level of confidence from its premises,"
2
The findings of expert consensus cited or reported in
this essay are published in Critical Thinking: A Statement of
Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and
Instruction. Peter A. Facione, principle investigator, The California
Academic Press, Millbrae, CA, 1990. (ERIC ED 315 423). In
1993/94 the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The
Pennsylvania State University undertook a study of 200 policy-
makers, employers, and faculty members from two-year and four-
year colleges to determine what this group took to be the core
critical thinking skills and habits of mind. The Pennsylvania State
University Study, under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Jones, was
funded by the US Department of Education Office of Educational
Research and Instruction. The Penn State study findings,
published in 1994, confirmed the expert consensus described in
this paper.

Do the people you regard as good
critical thinkers have the three cognitive skills
described so far?
Are they good at interpretation, analysis, and evaluation?
What about the next three? And your
examples of poor critical thinkers, are they
lacking in these cognitive skills? All, or just some?

To the experts inference means "to
identify and secure elements needed to draw
reasonable conclusions; to form conjectures
and hypotheses; to consider relevant
information and to educe the consequences
flowing from data, statements, principles,
evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions,
concepts, descriptions, questions, or other
forms of representation." As sub-skills of
inference the experts list querying evidence,
conjecturing alternatives, and drawing
conclusions. Can you think of some
examples of inference? You might suggest
things like seeing the implications of the
position someone is advocating, or drawing
out or constructing meaning from the
elements in a reading. You may suggest that
predicting what will happen next based what
is known about the forces at work in a given
situation, or formulating a synthesis of related
ideas into a coherent perspective. How about
this: after judging that it would be useful to
you to resolve a given uncertainty, developing
a workable plan to gather that information?
Or, when faced with a problem, developing a
set of options for addressing it. What about,
conducting a controlled experiment
scientifically and applying the proper
statistical methods to attempt to confirm or
disconfirm an empirical hypothesis?

Beyond being able to interpret,
analyze, evaluate and infer, good critical
thinkers can do two more things. They can
explain what they think and how they arrived
at that judgment. And, they can apply their
powers of critical thinking to themselves and
improve on their previous opinions. These
two skills are called "explanation" and
"self-regulation."

The experts define explanation as
being able to present in a cogent and
coherent way the results of one*s reasoning.
This means to be able to give someone a full
look at the big picture: both "to state and to
justify that reasoning in terms of the
evidential, conceptual, methodological,
criteriological, and contextual considerations
upon which one*s results were based; and to
present one*s reasoning in the form of cogent
arguments." Thesub-skills under explanation
are describing methods and results, justifying
procedures, proposing and defending with
good reasons one’s causal and conceptual
explanations of events or points of view, and
presenting full and well-reasoned, arguments
in the context of seeking the best
understandings possible. Your examples
first, please... Here are some more: to
construct a chart which organizes one*s
findings, to write down for future reference
your current thinking on some important and
complex matter, to cite the standards and
contextual factors used to judge the quality of
an interpretation of a text, to state research
results and describe the methods and criteria
used to achieve those results, to appeal to
established criteria as a way of showing the
reasonableness of a given judgment, to
design a graphic display which accurately
represents the subordinate and
super-ordinate relationship among concepts
or ideas, to site the evidence that led you to
accept or reject an author*s position on an
issue, to list the factors that were considered
in assigning a final course grade.

Maybe the most remarkable cognitive
skill of all, however, is this next one. This one
is remarkable because it allows good critical
thinkers to improve their own thinking. In a
sense this is critical thinking applied to itself.
Because of that some people want to call this
"meta-cognition," meaning it raises thinking to
another level. But "another level" really does
not fully capture it, because at that next level
up what self-regulation does is look back at
all the dimensions of critical thinking and
double check itself. Self-regulation is like a
recursive function in mathematical terms,
which means it can apply to everything,
including itself. You can monitor and correct
an interpretation you offered. You can
examine and correct an inference you have
drawn. You can review and reformulate one
of your own explanations. You can even
examine and correct your ability to examine
and correct yourself! How? It*s as simple as
stepping back and saying to yourself, "How
am I doing? Have I missed anything important?
Let me double check before I go further."

The experts define self-regulation to
mean "self-consciously to monitor one*s
cognitive activities, the elements used in
those activities, and the results educed,
particularly by applying skills in analysis, and
evaluation to one*s own inferential judgments
with a view toward questioning, confirming,
validating, or correcting either one*s
reasoning or one*s results."
The two sub-skills here are self-examination and
self-correction. Examples? Easy — to
examine your views on a controversial issue
with sensitivity to the possible influences of
your personal biases or self-interest, to check
yourself when listening to a speaker in order
to be sure you are understanding what the
person is really saying without introducing
your own ideas, to monitor how well you
seem to be understanding or comprehending
what you are reading or experiencing, to
remind yourself to separate your personal
opinions and assumptions from those of the
author of a passage or text, to double check
yourself by recalculating the figures, to vary
your reading speed and method mindful of
the type of material and your purpose for
reading, to reconsider your interpretation or
judgment in view of further analysis of the
facts of the case, to revise your answers in
view of the errors you discovered in your
work, to change your conclusion in view of
the realization that you had misjudged the
importance of certain factors when coming to
your earlier decision.

The Delphi Method

The panel of experts we keep referring
to included forty-six men and women from
throughout the United States and Canada.
They represented many different scholarly
disciplines in the humanities, sciences, social
sciences, and education. They participated in
a research project that lasted two years and
was conducted on behalf of the American
Philosophical Association. Their work was
published under the title Critical Thinking: A
Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes
of Educational Assessment and Instruction.
(The California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA,
1990). You may download the executive
summary of that report free. Visit
www.insightassessment.com/articles.html

You might be wondering how such a
large group of people could collaborate on
this project over that long a period of time and
at those distances and still come to
consensus. Good question. Remember
we’re talking the days before email.

Not only did the group have to rely on
snail mail during their two-year collaboration;
they also relied on a method of interaction,
known as the Delphi Method, which was
developed precisely to enable experts to think
effectively about something over large spans
of distance and time. In the Delphi Method a
central investigator organizes the group and
feeds them an initial question. [In this case it
had to do with how college level critical
thinking should be defined so that people
teaching at that level would know which skills
and dispositions to cultivate in their students.]
The central investigator receives all
responses, summarizes them, and transmits
them back to all the panelists for reactions,
replies, and additional questions.

Wait a minute! These are all well-known experts,
so what do you do if people
disagree? And what about the possible
influence of a big name person? Good
points. First, the central investigator takes
precautions to remove names so that the
panelists are not told who said what. They
know who is on the panel, of course. But
that*s as far as it goes. After that each
expert*s argument has to stand on its own
merits. Second, an expert is only as good as
the arguments she or he gives. So, the
central investigator summarizes the
arguments and lets the panelists decide if
they accept them or not. When consensus
appears to be at hand, the central investigator
proposes this and asks if people agree. If
not, then points of disagreement among the
experts are registered. We want to share
with you one important example of each of
these. First we will describe the expert
consensus view of the dispositions which are
absolutely vital to good critical thinking. Then
we will note a point of separation among the experts.

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